Katherina Thomas is a global health researcher and an award-winning literary journalist. Her writing draws on a decade’s experience in global health in sub-Saharan Africa — as an Ebola researcher and patient advocate — and braids creative nonfiction with oral history and immersive journalism. She is a visiting writer-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, where she explores the intersection of global health and literature, using stories to advocate for equity and justice.

Katherina collaborates with leading African public health practitioners in research and narrative medicine, and serves as an expert witness in US and UK health-related immigration justice cases. She has worked in more than 20 countries in Africa, in outbreaks of Lassa fever, cholera, conflicts in Mali, Libya, and D.R. Congo, and during the 2013-2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak. While living in Liberia between 2007 and 2017, she designed and led Liberia’s inaugural fellowship for health and medical journalists.

She trained at the University of Warwick, at the University of London in Paris, on the foreign desk of The Independent, and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She works fluently in both English and French as a writer and translator, and speaks Portuguese, Italian and Arabic.

“Absolutely brilliant — completely takes you to another world.”

Marina Hyde, The Guardian

“Asks questions with the sensitivity of a writer and the accuracy of a scientist.”

Dr. Pardis Sabeti, medical geneticist and Harvard professor

“A fascinating rumination on race, music, culture, and building a relationship with Africa.”